This application seeks partial support for the second Gordon Conference on Basement Membranes to be held in Plymouth, New Hampshire in June 1984. The conference is being held in recognition of the rapid progress and exciting advances which are currently being made in the field of basement membranes. The research in this area has turned out to be clearly multidisciplinary in nature involving the effort of biochemists, morphologists, immunologists, as well as cell and developmental biologists who are attempting to understand the structure, assembly and function of this vital extracellular component. Moreover medical investigators are focusing their attention on the changes which the basement membrane undergoes in conditions such as diabetes, neoplasia and various kidney diseases. The conference will bring together about 150 investigators from a wide spectrum of biomedical disciplines and the very special Gordon Conference format will provide, for a period of five days, a favorable setting for the scientific interchange of the latest findings and for the stimulation of ideas for new undertakings. The meeting will contain eight sessions, each of which will be devoted to one of the major areas of current basement membrane research. These will be guided by a discussion leader and will consist of talks by invited speakers from the USA and several foreign countries, interspersed by shorter presentations. The emphasis will be on provocative new and unpublished findings and discussion will be encouraged. Furthermore, poster sessions will be scheduled to supplement the oral presentations. Also included in the program will be a session which will feature a special lecture on the intriguing subject of the neuromuscular basement membrane in differentiation. The topics to be covered in this conference include ultrastructure and immunochemistry; biochemistry of the collagen, proteoglycan and glycoprotein components; biosynthesis including gene expression; interaction of basement membrane components with cell receptors; and role of basement membrane in morphogenesis and development. Two sessions will focus primarily on the effect of disease on basement membranes and these will address themselves to such subjects as basement membrane degradation in inflammatory states and neoplasia as well as the morphological, biochemical, immunochemical and functional alterations of the renal glomerular filter in diabetes, nephritis and Goodpasture's syndrome.